Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G) review – a great item – both for gaming and for the office

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Welcome to another episode of confusion.com. Today, the star of our review is the Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G). What looks like a successor to the Aspire 7 (A715-73G) is actually the direct successor of Acer Aspire 7 (A715-71G). Are you still with us? Okay, so let us explain why where all of this comes from.

While the numbers usually never lie, the case here is that the Aspire 7 (A715-73G) is a special device that has pretty much nothing to do with the other Aspire 7 laptops. As we mentioned in its review, the latter is, in fact, the proto-model for the ConceptD 5 (CN515-51), as they both share magnesium chassis and the fairly intricate Core i7-8705G – the one that has an AMD integrated GPU.

So, back to the Aspire 7 (A715-74G). This laptop is super sleek – it uses a lot of aluminum, can be maxed out with a Core i7-9750H and can be fitted with the GeForce GTX 1650. Hence, the notebook is not only looking nice, but it is also able to deliver some pure performance, thus being perfect for some Web designers, that are ashamed of gamer-centric hardware. For that, you would need a good monitor as well, which is why Acer has equipped the laptop with a 1080p IPS panel.

What’s in the box?

The packaging of this device is pretty standard – the laptop itself is placed inside a white protective cloth, while the power adapter is located in a separate box on its right. Speaking of which, the adapter itself is a 135W unit.

Design and construction

In terms of design, the Aspire 7 (A715-74G) is not a whole lot different from its predecessor, however, it indeed looks stunning. While both its lid and base are made out of aluminum, the bottom plate is plastic. When it comes to measurements, the notebook is 23.5mm high and weighs around 2.35 kg. Additionally, the base has chamfered edges, which make the laptop feel a lot more premium, but have a certain downside – more on that in a minute.

What is great about this device is that its lid opens effortlessly with a single hand. Its hinges are placed on either side of the chassis, which enhances the structural integrity and makes it less susceptible to flexing – sure thing is that the aluminum cover helps with that, as well.

Then we come to the base. It is home to a backlit keyboard, which thankfully features a NumberPad, even though it has its keys sized down a little, compared to the rest of the keyboard. Also, we are not big fans of the “Up” and “Down” arrow keys, which share a regular keycap size. Nevertheless, the board is fine to work with, as it has good tactile feedback and its key travel is … not too short.

Additionally, you are going to find a fingerprint reader on the right side of the base, while the touchpad is very comfortable. Although it lacks dedicated buttons we can describe the experience as good enough. By the way, do you remember the chamfered edges we are talking about earlier? Well, they make the aforementioned experience slightly less fantastic, as they (the edges) appear a bit too sharp, and you can certainly feel them on your wrists. What is also sharp are the edges around the keys – hence, the feeling you get after you press the space bar (for instance) is weird and with more imagination – could result in a cut.

Let’s turn the laptop on its lid and see what is underneath it. On either side of the machine, there are the speaker cut-outs. Moreover, you can see a spectacular ventilation grill that takes roughly half of the bottom plate. Hot air, on the other side, escapes from the back, as well as the right side of the notebook – we expect sufficient thermals behavior from the Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G).

Ports

On the left side, there is an RJ-45 connector, followed by an HDMI connector, a USB Type-C 3.1 (Gen. 1) port plus two USB Type-A 3.1 (Gen. 1) ports. Then on the right, you can see the power plug, as well as another USB port, this time Type-A 2.0. Lastly, there is an Audio Jack right next to that USB port.

Disassembly, upgrade options and maintenance

This laptop’s bottom panel is held in place by 11 Phillips-head screws. Then, it is super easy to pop the clips with a plastic pry tool and finally – remove the panel itself. On the inside, you are going to s… wait a second?! We have already seen this setup. In fact, we’ve not only seen it once before. Yep, this Aspire 7 (A715-74G) is actually an Acer Nitro 7 (AN715-51) in disguise… or a Nitro 5. Nevermind.

First, there is the cooling – it resembles three heat pipes, two of them are shared between the processor and the graphics card, while the third one is dedicated to the GPU only. Moreover, the third heat pipe does an awkward loop around the left fan and ends in a separate heat spreader.

What follows is one of the great feats of Acer this year. Not only they have included two RAM DIMMs that support up to 32GB of DDR4 memory. But this device supports up to 2 TB of 2.5″ SATA drive, as well as two M.2 NVMe drives.

Lastly, as far as the battery goes, the laptop features a 57.5Wh unit.

Display quality

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G) comes with a Full HD IPS panel, model number LG LP156WFC-SPD1 (LGD0563). Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution – 1920 х 1080p. Additionally, the screen ratio is 16:9, the pixel density – 142 ppi, their pitch – 0.18 x 0.18 mm. The screen can be considered Retina when viewed from at least 60 cm (from this distance, the average human eye can’t see the individual pixels).

Viewing angles are good. We offer images at different angles to evaluate the quality.

The maximum measured brightness is 270 nits (cd/m2) in the middle of the screen and 254 nits (cd/m2) average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 12%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen and at maximum brightness is 6480K (average) – almost matching the 6500K optimum for sRGB. The average color temperature through the grey scale before profiling is also 6480K.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from uniformity perspective. The illustration below shows how matters are for operational brightness levels (approximately 140 nits) – in this particular case at 54% Brightness (White level = 141 cd/m2, Black level = 0.108 cd/m2).
Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color-sensitive work (a maximum tolerance of 2.0 ). The contrast ratio is excellent – 1300:1.

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

Below you can compare the scores of Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G) with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 23 ms.

Health impact – PWM / Blue Light

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G)’s backlight is not PW-modulated at any brightness level. This ensures comfort to the eyes in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Conclusions

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G) has an IPS panel with a Full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, good contrast ratio, and non-flickering backlight. Its disadvantage is the modest color coverage.

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In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Drivers

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. As we mentioned, this notebook is equipped with a 57.5Wh battery.

In our tests, we got around 9 hours of Web browsing and just over 8 hours of video playback.

GPU options

While at the GPU-side, the choices come down to the GTX 1050 (3GB GDDR5) and the GTX 1650 (4GB GDDR5). While the difference in price is not that big, we suggest getting the latter, as it is more efficient and reasonably faster.

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74 / A715-74G) GPU variants

Here you can see an approximate comparison between the GPUs that can be found in the Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74 / A715-74G) models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74 / A715-74G) model is the best bang for your buck.

Note: The chart shows the cheapest different GPU configurations so you should check what the other specifications of these laptops are by clicking on the laptop’s name / GPU.

Temperatures and comfort

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

Core i7-9750H (45W TDP)

0:02 – 0:10 sec

0:15 – 0:30 sec

10:00 – 15:00 min

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G)

2.85 GHz (B+10%)@ 65°C

2.90 GHz (B+12%)@ 71°C

2.76 GHz (B+6%)@ 78°C

Lenovo Legion Y7000 (2019)

3.34 GHz (B+28%)@ 72°C

3.15 GHz (B+21%)@ 82°C

2.99 GHz (B+15%)@ 79°C

Lenovo Legion Y540

2.78 GHz (B+7%)@ 74°C

3.08 GHz (B+18%)@ 90°C

2.87 GHz (B+10%)@ 79°C

ASUS ROG G731

3.38 GHz (B+30%)@ 87°C

3.43 GHz (B+32%)@ 94°C

2.63 GHz @ 73°C

ASUS ROG G531

3.41 GHz (B+31%)@ 95°C

3.23 GHz (B+24%)@ 95°C

2.72 GHz (B+5%)@ 79°C

HP Omen 17 2019

3.44 GHz (B+32%)@ 86°C

2.74 GHz (B+5%)@ 71°C

2.67 GHz (B+3%)@ 71°C

Clearly Acer has chosen a more conservative way of cooling their laptop. Instead of pushing the fans to the max and limiting the usability of the notebook, the manufacturer is keeping the clock speeds below 3.00 GHz (still above the base clock), while the noise is low, as well as the temperatures throughout the entire test.

Real-life gaming

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)

GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)

Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G)

1552 MHz @ 70°C

1532 MHz @ 76°C

Dell G3 15 3590

1605 MHz @ 67°C

1566 MHz @ 74°C

ASUS ROG G531

1461 MHz @ 65°C

1408 MHz @ 71°C

ASUS TUF FX705

1566 MHz @ 74°C

1568 MHz @ 74°C

Acer Nitro 7 (AN715-51)

1633 MHz @ 61°C

1599 MHz @ 67°C

For a laptop that shares the same cooling system as the Nitro 7 (AN715-51), it was weird to see such a difference in the temperature and the clock speed.

Gaming comfort

The higher inner temperature of the GPU resulted in high outer temperature. Additionally, the fans were sweating up pretty much as well.

Verdict

Quite frankly, the Acer Aspire 7 (A715-74G) is one of the sleekest almost gaming laptops that have ever hit the market. It has an aluminum body, some cool-looking (but yet kind of dangerous) chamfered edges and it weighs somewhere around the weight of the new Helios 300.

Let’s start our last words on this device by admiring the dual-M.2 NVMe slot, provided by Acer. In a world where some manufacturers cut on upgradability, others excel. This Aspire 7 is on par with the Acer Nitro 7 (AN715-51) and the Nitro 5 (AN515-54), as one of the better products in terms of options for upgrade.

Moreover, the laptop has an exceptional battery life – more than 9 hours of Web browsing and 8 hours of video playback from its 57.5Wh package. What is also very appealing about this notebook is the fact that it looks so… regular. There are no flashy RGB or colorful backlights. There are no aggressive edges or shapes – just the typical laptop clamshell with narrow side bezels.

Speaking of aggressive edges… we lied. You see, the base of this notebook is surrounded by a chamfered edge. Indeed it looks very cool, even when you close the lid. However, it is not the most comfortable thing when you are trying to type. It is nothing too dramatic, but you can definitely feel it. Additionally, the edges around each keycap feel slightly sharper than it should. Or perhaps it is the fact that the keys go down too deep?

Then comes the display. It is a good IPS panel (LG LP156WFC-SPD1 (LGD0563)), but yet, it stands on the budget side. Although it has a good contrast ratio, comfortable viewing angles and its display doesn’t flicker, the 54% sRGB coverage makes it less appealing for some professionals.

Nevertheless, from a content creator standpoint, we were expecting an SD card reader and a Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. While the first can be quickly fixed by a dongle, you can’t really speed up the USB Type-C, unless you are tinkering with the hardware.

So, sadly we won’t be giving the Editor’s choice award to this exciting piece of hardware. It is just the small stuff that makes the end-user experience slightly less satisfactory. Else, the bigger picture looks very good, and we would be waiting for the successor and how Acer would tackle the issues that we (and most surely its users) will direct to them.

Pros

Stylish design features

Great battery life

Comfortable keyboard

Upgradability options are top-level for the branch

Good contrast ratio and lack of PWM for brightness adjustment (LG LP156WFC-SPD1 (LGD0563))

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Guest

Basel Bannoud

What about the display?

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6 months ago

Guest

Marc

Currently considering the purchase of this model… would like to know how stable and stiff the lid itself is?… Do attempts with pressing, warping come easily? Any ‘ghosts’ turn up on display when doing so? THX!

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3 months ago

Guest

Alex Iliev

Hey Marc,
The lid is surprisingly tough on this one. We didn’t observe any ghosting, but if you give it enough pressure (by enough I mean too much) some fading would certainly appear.

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3 months ago

Guest

JrJunior

@Alex liev Hey, I’d like to know if the battery results in this review are for the i7 9750, 16GB ram and GeForce GTX1650 model. I’m asking this because in every website where I see that model being sold, they say that the battery has a maximum of 7 hours, an information that supposedly came from acer itself, while in these tests, the battery values are way higher

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2 months ago

Guest

Alex Iliev

Hey, The model we tested has the same CPU and GPU you mentioned but it has 8 gigs of RAM. As of the results we got, we achieved them by running a single tab in Chrome, using a script that browses through a bunch of Web sites. Then we run an HD video on loop for the video playback results. All of this is done with the display brightness set at 120 nits (as mentioned in the review). So, what we tested was true for our unit and we highly doubt adding another 8GB stick will show significantly different results.… Read more »

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2 months ago

Guest

greg

What about the case?

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2 months ago

Guest

JrJunior

Hey, I’d like to know if the battery results in this review are for the i7 9750, 16GB ram and GeForce GTX1650 model. I’m asking this because, in every website where I see that model being sold, they say that the battery has a maximum of 7 hours, an information that supposedly came from acer itself.